The article was intended for *Pravda*. In content it is close to the note, perhaps also written by Vladimir Ilyich, "The New Dreyfus Case"—published in the *Pravda Leaflet* of July 6 (19), 1917, and written, probably, in the same days of July 5 (18)—7.

V. I. Lenin.

## 12.

THE DREYFUSIAD.

July 1917

The old unites with the newest—so it has always been in the methods of exploitation and repression applied by Tsarism, so it has remained in republican Russia.

The political persecution of the Bolsheviks, as a party of the international revolutionary proletariat, the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie seasons with the vilest slanders and a "campaign" in the press of a type entirely homogeneous with the campaign of French clerical and monarchist newspapers in the Dreyfus affair.

At all costs accuse Dreyfus of espionage!—such was the watchword then. At all costs accuse someone from among the Bolsheviks of espionage!—such is the watchword now. The vilest slander, falsifications, crude lies and refined work of confusing the reader—all these methods the yellow and generally bourgeois press deploys with extraordinary zeal. In general what results is a frenzied howl, in which sometimes one cannot find not only arguments, but even simply articulate sounds.

Here are some of the methods of our newest republican Dreyfusiad. At first they "promoted" three main "pieces of evidence": Ermolenko, twenty million at Kozlovsky's, the implication of Parvus*).

The next day the main pogrom newspaper *Zhivoe Slovo* already prints two "corrections," recognizing [the secondary character of Ermolenko's testimony]—[declaring the Bolshevik] leader not bribed, but a fanatic, and replacing twenty million with twenty thousand. And another newspaper already declared Ermolenko's testimony to be of secondary importance.

In the *Pravda Leaflet* of July 6 we have already demonstrated the complete absurdity of Ermolenko's testimony. It is clear that reference to it proved inconvenient.

In that same *Leaflet* is printed a letter from Kozlovsky refuting the slander. After the refutation of 20,000,000 they reduce it to 20,000—instead of a precise figure again a "round number"!

They implicate Parvus, striving with all their might to create some connection between him and the Bolsheviks. But in reality it was precisely the Bolsheviks who in the Geneva *Social-Democrat* even then called Parvus a renegade (the article on Parvus was titled "At the Last Boundary"²), came out against him with merciless condemnation, as against the German Plekhanov, and eliminated once and for all any possibility whatsoever of any rapprochement with such social-chauvinists. It was precisely the Bolsheviks in Stockholm at a solemn meeting with the participation of Swedish left socialists who categorically refused not only to speak with Parvus, but even to admit him in any capacity whatsoever, not even as a guest.

Ganetsky conducted commercial affairs as an employee of a firm in which Parvus had a share. Commercial and financial correspondence, of course, proceeded under censorship and was entirely open to control in its entirety. They strive to confuse these commercial affairs with politics, although they prove this by absolutely nothing!!

They reach such an absurd thing as reproaching *Pravda* for the fact that its telegrams to socialist newspapers in Sweden and all other countries (which naturally also went through censorship and were completely known to the censors) were reprinted by German newspapers, sometimes with distortion! As if reprinting or malicious distortions can be held against one!

A true Dreyfusiad, a campaign of lies and slander on the basis of savage political hatred.... But how filthy must be the sources that substitute the struggle of ideas with the spreading of slander!

*) On the circumstances accompanying the slanderous campaign of the bourgeoisie against the Bolsheviks in the July days, see Collected Works, vol. XIV, part 2, articles: "Where is the Authority and Where is the Counter-revolution," "Vile Slanders of the Black-Hundred Newspapers and Alexinsky," "Reply."

²) *Social-Democrat* No. 48 of November 20, 1915 (Collected Works, vol. XIII.)